On the last days of my freshman year at college, I felt an itch.
I walked around my dorm in a state of antsy malaise. I couldn’t focus on anything. My sleep was fitful and shallow. My moods were erratic, both tears and giddy laughter at the ready. I hadn’t yet found a name for the feeling. Instead I described the symptoms to my roommate, a vegan activist with whom I rarely agreed.
“Like I’m cranky, I guess? But energized,” I said. “I feel like my brain is an etch-a-sketch that needs to get shook.”
“You need to get laid,” Janine replied.
I was eighteen. I had had sex with three people, all of whom were “boyfriends,” and as such were individuals barely sanctioned by society to allow into my lady garden. I still hadn’t had sex with a woman, though the heavy petting my summer girlfriend and I enjoyed indicated that she’d get the garden keys eventually.
My mother taught me that after losing her virginity, a woman is like a bowl of soup that’s had dirty fingers dipped in it. I was taught by my woefully incomplete Ohio public school sex education that Abstinence is the Best Choice. But best for whom? And when? Not when I was a sixteen-year-old who was “in love.” And not now, when I was ready to rub myself against a tree like a grizzly bear.
It was the week between finals and commencement, which meant the entire campus swam in a sea of hormones. Spring had sprung in a singularly Midwestern fashion, with magnolias and squirrels alike harmonizing “Let’s Get It On.” No one had an eight a.m. class. No one had a paper to write or test for which to cram. It was a utopia. Two-thousand attractive adults with food and lodging handled, at least for the week, with nothing to do but unwind.
My roommate was getting high and listening to Ani DiFranco with two upperclassmen who were likewise liberated from things like the honey-industrial complex and the virgin/whore dichotomy. Through the open window, a warm breeze carried the scent of a thousand kinds of blooming flowers.
“Here,” Janine said, digging through a box beneath her bed. “Use my vibrator.”
She pulled out a canvas box and opened it to reveal a purple plastic vibrator crusted with battery acid.
“Uh,” I said.
“Damn,” Janine said. “It’s been a while. Better just find yourself a dick then.”
I scoffed. “I’m single.” My last breakup was six months prior, and I was still gutted. Though I was a horny eighteen year old, I felt incapable of crushing on anyone new.
“Horniness is like hunger,” Janine said. “It’s a natural bodily function that indicates you need something. So go out and find someone to help you out.”
“You’re lucky,” her friend said, peering up from beneath a hand-knit Peruvian wool cap and holding a lighter over the end of the bong. “You’re pretty, and you’re surrounded by thousands of other pretty people, all of whom are the same age and most of whom are single. This is the best of all possible sex worlds.”
I was helpless in the face of her logic but confounded by her frankness. “No, you don’t understand. I’ve just never…done that.”
“Sometimes you just need to have sex, Allison,” Janine said. “You don’t need love. You just need a friendly, willing partner. Go get lucky.”
“Lucky,” I repeated to myself as I trudged across campus. “What does that even mean?” As though sex were a slot machine. You just had to keep shoving in nickels and pulling a lever until everything came up cherries.
The campus was alight with dozens of parties. I wandered until I heard music, then followed it onto a porch.
At this point I had never been drunk, but something told me my first foray into dick-fishing wasn’t a good time to lose my booze-ginity. I sipped on a syrupy cranberry juice and made small talk with other party goers, many of whom I only barely recognized.
I didn’t know what a potential casual sex partner should look like, or be like. Everyone until that point I had vetted against a “boyfriend” standard. I didn’t need to be nearly so strict, I assumed. I attempted to recalibrate as I refilled my red Solo cup with juice.
Someone had a guitar, and he passed it to a long-haired boy to play. The boy expertly, but modestly, played a few bars and then handed it back. He won me over right there (the giving back part, not the playing.)
His name was Federico Torres, a name he offered with a note of humiliation. Point number two for modesty, though, in retrospect, possible internalized racism. He had a New England intellectual flair, colored by a Brazilian upbringing. He was unassumingly good looking, had a nice smile, and made eye contact when he talked. He wore glasses. We talked about books and travel. I was engaged enough to enjoy myself but not bowled over by desire. He was, I decided in that moment, a terrific fit for a one-night-stand. A perfect practice partner to rid myself of my “sex is an expression of committed love” training wheels.
Federico and I talked for a while, sipping from our plastic cups. It was my idea to leave together. We agreed on his place, though it wasn’t really his place, he added. Not promising, but, though my dorm was closer, it also housed three stoned vegans listening to Ani DiFranco, so that wasn’t happening.
We stumbled up dark stairs into a dark room and onto a dark mattress in the middle of a bare floor. His thick brown hair fell in my face when we kissed. I tried to brush it away and ended up gripping it in a clump behind his head. Though I would do this with many girls to come, this moment, pre-girls, pre-kink, felt pragmatic more than portentous.
His newness was thrilling and odd. I learned how to kiss him as we kissed. I learned how to touch him as we touched. Everything was the first and only. This kind of sex was like watching a city pass by the window of a train. You see so many things, sometimes things people who live there never see. But it is brief and fleeting and then it’s gone.
Sex with Federico didn’t last long, but it didn’t need to. My itch got scratched.
We drifted off shortly after.
I woke up a few hours later to the heavy morning sun and enjoyed what was to be the first of many strange-room-morning-reveals.
We had spent the night on a mattress on the floor; nothing new for college. What I hadn’t noticed until daylight was the white plastic sheeting that draped the walls. White gauze curtains cascaded from the ceiling to form a quasi-headboard canopy type thing. A white stuccoed mannequin sat in parts in the corner. The white-washed hardwood floor was marred by splats of stucco and thick white paint.
Federico slept, his features even sweeter in the new light, his naked body providing the only color in an otherwise colorless room.
I eased off the mattress and found my discarded clothing. As I snapped my bra shut, Federico woke. He reached for his glasses and smiled.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” I replied.
“This isn’t my room,” he said, as though that would explain the scene.
“Okay,” I said.
“My roommates are probably in the living room.”
“Okay.”
“Thanks,” he said. “That was nice.”
“Likewise,” I said, crawling on the mattress to kiss him on the cheek.
On the way out I waved awkwardly at the roommates assembled in the living room, smoking weed and gossiping. As the screen door slammed behind me, I heard them cheer “FEDERIIIIICOOOO!!!” On the walk home, I integrated the realization that my mere overnight presence could render a boy a hero to his friends.
Though we never talked again, over the subsequent years I would see Federico every once in a while in a crowded party or across the quad. One party, while cuddled up against a new paramour, I looked across the living-room-cum-dance-floor and saw him politely decline an offered guitar. I thought about how awesome it was to get to have my first no-strings-attached sex with such a simply good dude. I got lucky.
Oh. Lucky. I get it now.